The King’s List. Peter Ransley

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СКАЧАТЬ whatever tattered scraps they wore remained firmly on their heads. The rumble of an approaching carriage caused the apprentices to cry out in increased fervour.

      ‘Off with their hats!’

      One caught a woman a stinging blow on the head. Her bonnet flew off. The blow scarcely interrupted her singing but the child with her flinched and darted away, stopping when she saw the carriage. There was no danger. The coachman saw her, slowed and turned away the horses. But the occupant of the carriage, no doubt in a hurry, rapped loudly with his stick. The coachman jumped, lost the reins for a moment and the horses panicked, heading straight for the child. There was an innocence in her mud-stained face, a curiosity in her widening eyes as she stared towards the tossing heads, the shafts that were about to impale her.

      There are some instincts that, however rusty, spring back into life. It was the cavalryman I had once been who drove his horse between the carriage and the child, diverting the horses towards the street posts and helping the coachman bring them back under control.

      The apprentices had stopped shouting and the Quakers singing. The child had not moved. She still had that fixed look of curiosity on her face. I picked up her hat, which had been swept off in the draught from my horse, and gave it to her. She turned and ran, disappearing into the group of Quakers.

      The door of the carriage scraped open, its occupant so corpulent he could extract himself only with the aid of the footman, whom he berated, before flinging abuse at the coachman.

      I found my breath. ‘You should leave your coachman to do the driving, sir.’

      He moved to face me at the speed of a ship turning round. His fat cheeks narrowed his eyes into slits. ‘You should leave the country, Sir Thomas, to those who know how to govern it.’

      I had not seen Sir Lewis Challoner for years. Cromwell had thrown out Royalists like Sir Lewis, creating the Rump Parliament, which had now returned, giving the army some semblance of legitimacy. It was another sign of unrest that, in spite of his part in the rebellion, he was back.

      ‘Go home, Sir Lewis. You are banned from the City.’

      He smiled. Suddenly he was enjoying himself. ‘You are forgetting yourself, sir. You are dislodged from office, are you not, Sir Thomas?’

      The singing began again, this time on a triumphant, exalted note. A man was holding up the child I had saved. He was an odd figure in that crowd, dressed in sailor’s slops, a coloured jumble of canvas doublet, breeches and linen shirt, tight-fitting to avoid being caught in the rigging of a ship. At his side stood a woman who would soon be in danger of wearing no clothes at all. She was flinging away her tattered skirt and beginning to remove her blouse, the singers round her chanting in ecstasy. The apprentices watched in a mixture of stunned disbelief and licentiousness. I had heard of this Quaker rite, but never seen it. The woman reached a state of euphoria where the innocence of Eden came upon her and compelled her to remove her clothes before God entered the garden, asking who told her of her nakedness.

      In this attempt to return to a time before sin she had unpeeled her blouse, revealing breasts which, from bearing children, were as shrunk as old leather wine bottles. Perhaps the girl perched on the sailor’s shoulders was her child. Far from feeling the cold and the driving rain, the woman embraced it, her skin glowing with effort, drawing superstitious awe from the watching crowd.

      Except for Sir Lewis. What was innocence for her was the utmost depravity for him, a consequence of the religious licence Cromwell had given such pernicious sects.

      As she dropped the blouse in a pool, spurning it with her dancing feet, Sir Lewis ordered his footman to seize the whore while the coachman went for a constable.

      ‘If there still is anyone keeping order in this Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he said.

      ‘Leave her,’ I said to the footman. ‘I will deal with her.’

      Sir Lewis lost all restraint. The brooding sourness built up during his enforced exile burst out of him. He looked the arrogant, despotic hanging magistrate I had first met years ago.

      ‘You? You can do nothing! You are one of the creators of this evil!’

      The woman, now naked, danced in a mounting frenzy, matched by the insistent rhythm of the Quakers’ singing, accompanied by the apprentices, whose shocked outrage had been overwhelmed by prurience. They outdid one another in nudges and jokes, gazing lasciviously, their handclapping, which had begun with a mocking slowness, increasing in speed until it matched the ecstasy of the singers.

      ‘Your master Thurloe has been sacked. You have no power. No position. It is you who should flee – if you can, regicide!’ He spat the word out. ‘There was a ballot to be on the jury of those who killed the King. I was lucky enough to win a place.’

      When you have been in power for a decade you do not lose it overnight, whether it has substance or not. ‘Get in your coach, Sir Lewis, or I will bring an action against you for endangering the life of that child.’

      ‘That slattern –’ he began, but saw the look on my face and turned to shout at his coachman to open the door.

      I strode over to the crowd. The apprentices stopped clapping when they saw my expression. Disgust and outrage began to return to their faces at the sight of the naked woman.

      ‘Stop her,’ I said to the sailor.

      ‘I cannot. She is with the Lord.’

      I told an apprentice to fetch a constable. ‘Name,’ I said to the sailor.

      ‘Stephen Butcher,’ he said, with one of those beatific smiles that made me want to strike him across the face.

      I knew of him. He was one of the followers of the Quaker preacher James Nayler who had re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on an ass. I had wanted Nayler to be dealt with quietly, but he had been charged with blasphemy, flogged, and his tongue bored. As I feared, his supporters had increased tenfold.

      There was no sign of the constable. The apprentices were looking at me expectantly, itching to be told to lay their hands on the woman. Blood oozed in a muddy rivulet on one of her feet where she had cut herself on a stone, but she seemed unaware of it. I looked away but, in spite of myself, could not keep my eyes from her. Shrivelled as her breasts were, her gyrations and the look of ecstasy on her uplifted face smoothed out its lines, giving it a strange, mesmeric beauty, and leaving no doubt that the girl who had nearly been killed was her daughter.

      Her dance not only took the years from her; it took them from me. Anne’s body was a distant memory. When the urge came on me, Scogman found me a whore. Working for Cromwell late into every night had killed the desire even for that. I was not sorry. I thought of love, if I thought of it at all, as a false god, a spy within which robbed a man of his secrets and left him helpless, out of control. I had seen many men ruined by love; I had almost been destroyed by it myself. Had not my relationship with Anne become immeasurably better without love?

      As I stared at the twist and turn of the woman’s rump, I caught the sailor’s smile, more knowing than saintly. I snatched up her clothes and thrust them angrily at him. ‘Cover her.’

      ‘Is that what your voice is telling you?’

      I had had enough of the Quakers and their inner voices. I flung the clothes at him. ‘Do it!’

      Without the smile leaving his face, СКАЧАТЬ